Category: Student News

The Department of History and Geography is delighted to announce that Cecilia Barnard, a doctoral student in Clemson’s Digital History Ph.D. program, has been awarded the Nancy Rupprecht Memorial Graduate Student Prize by the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association.

The prize, which recognizes the best graduate student paper in European Women’s History, was awarded for Barnard’s paper “Ite’s Beetle: Gender and Motherhood in the Shifting Religious Landscape of Ireland from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Century.” Barnard originally presented this research at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies in the panel “Who Is She? Medieval Responses to Shifting Ideas of Womanhood.”

The Nancy Rupprecht Memorial Graduate Student Prize honors the legacy of Dr. Nancy Rupprecht, a distinguished historian of the Holocaust, World War II, and the Hitler Youth who was deeply committed to supporting European Women’s History and graduate studies. The prize is awarded annually by the European History Section (EHS), the oldest professional association of historians focusing on European History in the United States, founded in 1955 as an affiliate society of the Southern Historical Association.

Thinking about applying to Clemson’s groundbreaking Digital History Ph.D. program? Join us for one of our upcoming virtual information sessions!

We will be hosting several informational Zoom sessions in Fall 2025 for prospective applicants to the Digital History Ph.D. program. These sessions will cover program requirements, application tips, and frequently asked questions—and will include time for open Q&A with the program directors.

Upcoming Sessions:

• October 3rd, 3:00 PM Eastern
• October 21st, 4:00 PM Eastern
• November 18th, 4:00 PM Eastern
• December 15th, 12:00 PM Eastern

Whether you’re curious about our innovative curriculum, want to learn about funding opportunities, or have questions about what makes digital history unique, these sessions are designed to help you navigate the application process and determine if our program is the right fit for your academic and career goals.

Please complete the form below to register your interest. A Zoom link and additional details will be sent by one of the Ph.D. directors ahead of each session.

Register Here

Can’t make any of these times? Feel free to reach out to our program directors directly at dhphd@clemson.edu with your questions.

Applications for Fall 2026 admission are due January 15, 2026.

The Department of History is proud to share that Amber Edwards, a first-year student in the Ph.D. Program in Digital History, has been selected as an inaugural editorial fellow for the national digital history project Sharing Stories from 1977: Putting the National Women’s Conference on the Map.

Amber is one of only twenty graduate students chosen from across the country for this competitive fellowship. Funded by a multi-institutional collaborative led by the University of Houston, Sharing Stories from 1977 is a major digital public history initiative that recovers and amplifies the voices and experiences of those who participated in the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. The project brings together scholars, students, and community members to create a rich and accessible digital resource documenting the conference and its ongoing legacies.

Amber recently completed her first year in Clemson’s Digital History Ph.D. program and works under the direction of Dr. Amanda Regan. Her research interests lie at the intersection of women’s history, political history, and the digital humanities. She is especially interested in how digital tools can help uncover hidden narratives within the historical record. You can learn more about her work at amberedwards.net.

As a fellow, Amber will work with one of the project’s editorial teams from September 2025 to July 2026, participating in workshops, virtual editorial pods, and hands-on digital publishing. Her selection reflects her strong commitment to women’s history, her experience with digital humanities, and her promise as a scholar and editor.

Please join us in congratulating Amber on this exciting achievement!

Digital History Ph.D. Students Amber Edwards and Hallie Knipp have both won Summer Research Fellowships from Clemson University’s Humanities Hub!

Amber Edwards, a first year Digital History Ph.D. student, received funding to conduct archival research at Bowling Green State University’s Browne Library for Pop Culture Studies and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive. Edwards is a 20th Century U.S. historian of women, gender and sexuality – specifically interested in the music culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s in the context of radical feminism and mass American culture. These archives house a variety of zines – non-professional magazines often associated with fan culture of rock music and its offshoots – including some focused on the counterculture and feminism of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Edwards is seeking to analyze how the gender consciousness of hippie women is portrayed within zines alongside the music and culture to explore where content covering hippie culture might intersect with publications expressing radical feminist ideology.

Hallie Knipp, a third year Digital History Ph.D. student, received funding to support research for her dissertation project, Mountain Labors: Contraceptives and Eugenics in Kentucky, 1915-1945. This research explores how birth control programs in early 20th-century Appalachia were shaped by intersecting forces of social reform, public health, and eugenics. Organizations like the Kentucky Birth Control League (KBCL) expanded reproductive healthcare access, but often with troubling motivations—especially through partnerships with eugenicists who sought to control who could and couldn’t access contraception. While some efforts empowered rural women, others targeted vulnerable populations, reinforcing racial and class-based hierarchies. With the support of this grant, Knipp will conduct archival research at the University of Kentucky and the Kentucky Historical Society, examining key collections such as the Alice Lloyd Caney Creek Community Center papers and the Family Planning in Kentucky collection. By mapping the geographic spread of these programs, this study will reveal the lived experiences of women affected by these initiatives—whether as reformers, patients, or those resisting imposed policies. This work sheds light on the complex history of reproductive healthcare in Appalachia and its lasting impact.

First year Ph.D. student Candace Boatwright has won the Lewis P. Jones Research Fellowship in South Carolina History from the Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. The award will fund Boatwright’s research into the social and political history of Unionism in upstate South Carolina. The Lewis P. Jones Fellowship provides researchers who are researching South Carolina History with the opportunity to conduct research at the South Caroliniana Library.

Second year Ph.D. student Lucas Avelar has been selected as a Mellon Data Fellow for the Freedom on the Move project. As a Fellow, Avelar will spend eight weeks this summer in residence at Cornell University and the experience will count as his internship for the Ph.D. program.

The Freedom on the Move project compiles stories of resistance from fugitive slave ads in newspapers. Through their online database and extensive metadata, the project’s represents “a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.”

As a data fellow, Avelar will work with digital humanists and scholars of slavery, resistance, marronage, and emancipation to help deepen Freedom on the Move dataset. He will also work with a faculty mentor to develop a research paper related to the project.

Second year Ph.D. student Hallie Knipp has been accepted to attend Columbia University’s Archives as Data Workshop this June in New York City. An exclusive NEH funded institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Knipp will spend two weeks learning to organize and analyze large document collections for textual analysis and will participate in several seminars with scholars in the field. The institute is jointly hosted by Columbia’s History Lab and Columbia’s Library.

The “NEH-funded program will offer practical training for historians and archivists in processing and analyzing textual data… Participants in the Text-as-Data workshop, designed for historians, will learn how to organize and analyze large document collections and use new methods to formulate original arguments. All participants will come together in seminar-style discussions on the novel challenges posed by doing archival research in the age of “big data,” including issues related to community representation, protecting private information in online archives, and the professional and scholarly pitfalls in navigating this new terrain.”